cover image Poisoned Blood: A True Story of Murder, Passion, and an Astonishing Hoax

Poisoned Blood: A True Story of Murder, Passion, and an Astonishing Hoax

Philip E. Ginsburg. Scribner Book Company, $18.95 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-684-18669-6

The tale of a woman with a genius for deception, this is one of the most riveting true-crime stories in memory. Audrey Marie Hilley grew up in Alabama as a pampered child, feeling that she was entitled to the best; when her middle-class lifestyle after marriage and two children did not provide funds for the best, she kited checks and then poisoned her husband for his insurance money and attempted to poison her daughter. Arrested, she jumped bail and assumed a new identity, that of Robbi Hannon, met and married a second husband and moved with him to New Hampshire. Evidently bored with that identity, she left temporarily and returned as her ""twin sister,'' Teri, announcing that Robbi had died; the disguise apparently fooled her husband, but not all of the people she had known as Robbi. She was eventually unmasked, returned to Alabama for trial, found guilty of murder and imprisoned in 1983. The saga of this cold, cruel and calculating person, told expertly by former Providence Journal-Bulletin reporter Ginsburg, is memorable. First serial to Good Housekeeping; Literary Guild alternate. (January)